The inability to be oneself.

Recently, I have read some tragic events regarding life taking stories that circulated simultaneously around the internet. It was really tragic and first my deep condolences to whoever is affected. I read a story on a post that the person is referring to someone who have taken his own life with added detail that the person committed suicide and leaving his wife and kids. That detail alone already struck me to the core and enough to give me a panic attack in which gave similar feelings to my last year episodes. I talked to my friends about this story and then I told them that it is not about the idea of committing suicide that led to the person demise, but first, the inability of live as oneself. When the ability to live as oneself has been taken away, living simply becomes unbearable. You don’t want to be you, as simple as that. You hate yourself to the core, it is unbearable to look into the mirror and see oneself. Even the thought of you makes you sick and sad. One day goes by, the second day feels longer, the third day feels awfully longer, and we are just basically counting days to the day one finally admits defeat. The hole with no end, head conversations that leads to nothing, gravity without resistance, falling with an accelerated speed, timeless in its nature, eternal peace in mind, the only thought that is worth the time is nothingness.

The pillar of the self has finally crumbled and there is nothing that he could live up for and he surely won’t forgive himself for yielding the hammer that destructs the pillars. The case of the story that I read, involves on money, let’s talk about money. I think we could agree that it is reasonable to say that live kind of revolves or at least backed upon the idea of accumulating wealth. The ability to buy house, provide shelter, food, water, funsies, etc. We accumulate wealth by doing something and getting paid to do something, for the longest time of our lives this will be a really sustaining thing, not only for us but also for our family. Remember, this is just one example. Imagine, you’ve worked so hard till the retired age and you have decided that you want to retire, you’ve retired happily. Somehow you are just informed that the thing you put your wealth on, either your children, beliefs, any, or even stocks went down to be literally worthless. All the years you’ve spent on working literally fucking evaporates in a matter of seconds of that phone call you’ve just received regarding the evaporation of your wealth, you now have nothing. Nothing. Surely, it is hard to imagine just by reading this black sans text until you’ve really experienced it but that case is one of the case that lead to the suicide story that I read. I see a father of a children hates his past decision so much he is forever trapped on that decision that brings upon ruins not only for him, the retirement money that he has been working for but also the dreams that he financed the education of his children, he couldn’t live as himself anymore, his old face is no longer the face he bares.

Sometimes what happens in the fall into the abyss is that the sustaining events of our lives cease to occur. Sanity is sustained by the network of validating, affirming connections that exist in a person’s life, connecting to other beings. If those links fail, one falls. Strip any person of their sustaining links to others, and that person falls. No one is immune, because madness is a possibility of every human life.

I do believe that each of us has our own sustaining thing, unconsciously it shapes us who we are and how we interact today, you may not even realize it, that’s why madness and depression always feel like it came out of nowhere. Because we understand ourselves so little! Fuck, there’s even a job dedicated to understand ourselves better. How much time do we really give ourselves to understand ourselves? I asked myself that so much in the past, I began to delve in to understand psychiatry, started off by reading suicide cases, suicide notes, signs of them, the things they say when on consultation with their psychiatry, their views and even their deteriorating slander and quality of life over time. I want to understand, I want to understand why the unimaginable happen to some people and speculate the possibility the same could happen to me.

For the longest time, I have loved living, until there was a time not so distant that I have felt that I couldn’t go another day living as myself. An extremely clouded judgement that is jaded beyond salvation. For the longest time, I believed that mental illness, depression, etc is not something I would eventually catch on because I live a fairly healthy live and I wasn’t born without any inborn error. For the longest time, I believed that I will never catch mental illness, until the day I tried committed suicide.

People often fall not because the bad happens, but rather because the good stops happening

“The ability to be oneself” is a very entertaining article because It will be the first controversial debut of my own arguments on mental illness. I am not an advocate nor a professional, just a guy who loves reading books. I believe no matter how we look at it, it is impossible to commit to anyone or to point out at anyone or even yourself that you are fool-proof of having mental illness. Hell, look down at me all you want, I am not ashamed of any of my writings, all of them are and have been my honest voice. I write not to entertain, I write because I need to, It gives me a sense of purpose and desire, I fucking love writing.

For the longest time of my life, I see people are generally born into two categories, people who has mental illness and who don’t. The people who don’t will see the stories of their brothers with illness with utmost strangeness or to some degree alienation perhaps, they doesn’t see even just a glimmer of themselves in their eyes, they see people who thinks of the act of stop living as cowards, dysfunctional, or even a goddamn inborn error. Why God would be so cruel to create something to order them to kill themselves? Think about how they feel before you think. Their brothers and sisters are alienated and ridiculed, they found no safe space other than to keep it to themselves.

We grow to bare shame to have this “feelings that should not be speak of”. We kept it to ourselves in utmost crucial times. We have no one that we trust. We see this as mere defects, we thought to ourselves and taught ourselves that is must be wrong to feel this way and surely that there is something wrong with our mind, with us. I think it is the grown mentality and the culture around us that this is so to unforgivable to speak of or deemed unacceptable that we looked down to ourselves when we have this “moments of doubts” we found nobody but ourselves to bear our so-called “defects” is just brutal.

I’ve listened to many of my friends similar moments and it is almost always cooped up with some extent of extreme loneliness. But when they finally made the decision to share it to me, there’s light in their eyes that is glad to finally realize that they are not crazy to have those “feelings’ I would argue in some cases, to feel such “extreme” it is a human reaction in a very human context. Alienating that idea and feeling less “human” other than one past-self is the true problem. Because when one denies to live as oneself, one opens the door to self annihilation and self destruction. How could one possibly care about themselves when they are already not feeling “like” themselves or their past self for the sake of the figure of speech.

One night when I was on my path to self destruction I was suddenly reminded that there’s an option that I hadn’t take, which is to call a suicide prevention line, I called them and say the things I needed to say, I rambled out for a whole hour or more, the other person on the line just listened and listened attentively. I was calmed the moment that she said

It is not your fault, don’t drag all of this on you.

Trust me, even though I’m a stranger, but as a human being, I love you, and I want you to continue to live, I promise you that this will pass, you will come out of this a stronger person.

It is not your fault but you take it all on you, it is beginning to be too much to handle for your own good, I know you hated yourself because of this but please remember that it is not your fault.

The moment that I feel understood, I feel like being myself is worth trying again. I will continue on living being myself again, the idea of being myself is no longer so destructing anymore, I am able to live as myself. Surely it just don’t happen that easily, I still relapsed every now and then after weeks and months after the call but everything has generally gets better now. I hope whatever you are dealing with that suffocates you, I hope you understand that there’s less reason to bear with it alone, if you’re afraid your friends looking down on you, you could contact the hotline, they won’t, they understand this better than how your friend does. Don’t and never look at these things for granted, because these ‘things’ reportedly usually always seem to appear out of nowhere. It consumes the soul the same way it has consumed countless others. It is not to be taken light of and be neglected about, it is a serious disease and everybody is ashamed to talk about it.

I hope you are always well, as a human to another, I would really love that you’d continue living.

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Started writing and finished writing in 12 of May 2022.